Editorial: Presidential debate fantasy vs. reality TV

President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney talk at the end of the first presidential debate in Denver, Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Jim Lehrer has been a thoughtful and insightful broadcast journalist on public television for more than 40 years, earning a reputation for moderating intelligent discussion.

But his performance Wednesday night was not his finest hour. His questions were virtually indistinguishable, prompting each candidate, over and again, to explain how his position on a given topic differed from that of his opponent. He also chose not to venture into immigration, gay marriage or any other domestic topic not primarily fiscal in nature. The result: a formless blur of dueling tax-related talking points and statistics, largely outside the moderator's control.

But the problem wasn't just Lehrer's. The Commission on Presidential Debates would do well to re-examine its formats in a way that would impose more order and make the candidates more responsive to the questions.

Of the three in use, Wednesday night's, with a moderator posing all the questions to candidates at podiums, is by far the worst. A "town hall" format, with questions coming from undecided voters, forces the candidates to be more deferential. If the questions are to come from a single moderator, seating everyone around a table allows the moderator to be more assertive in keeping the candidates on topic.

The commission might also propose new formats. How about one where the candidates grill each other directly? The moderator would be there only to make sure they stay on schedule and to referee.

Wednesday's performance was just the latest evidence that it's past time to trade in the tired 1960 debate model for something new.

In August and September, the political universe was focused on the question of whether conventions matter. Now, with Mitt Romney widely viewed as the winner of the first debate, the question is: Do debates matter?

Yes, they do. Sixty-seven million people wouldn't tune in if they didn't.

Debates have a way of moving polls, generally in favor of the non-incumbent party. But only twice in the half-century since the first televised debate do they appear to have swung an election.

John Kennedy won the historically tight 1960 election after beating Richard Nixon on style points in the first televised debate. Twenty years later, the lone debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter had a more dynamic effect. Carter was widely seen as an ineffectual president, with the economy in the grips of stagflation and 52 Americans held hostage in Iran. Yet voters were suspicious of Reagan. Some thought he was too strident and others wondered whether an actor could be a serious and effective president. One debate with Carter did away with these apprehensions.

But those years were exceptions. More commonly, incumbents who lost initial debates with listless performances came back to win despite brief declines in the polls.

So if Romney wants the debates to be the deciding factor in this year's election, he'll have to complete the remaking of his image that began Wednesday.

Fantasy, Part 1: President Obama's

The presidential debate was so full of inaccuracies by both candidates that fact-checkers are still sorting out the distortions, but here are some, beginning with President Obama.

Obama advocated we "take some of the money that we're saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America."

Great idea, until you recall Obama has repeatedly attacked Republicans for running up the national debt by fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "on a credit card." In other words, the billions in war funding is borrowed money, and now that we're "saving" it, the president wants to spend it elsewhere.

Obama has likewise included these "savings" in his plan to reduce the debt, which is bogus for a slightly different reason: The war in Iraq is over, and the war in Afghanistan is due to end in 2014, so claiming more than $800 billion in "savings" over 10 years takes credit for a lot of money that would never be spent (and borrowed) anyway.

Fantasy, Part 2: Gov. Romney's

Romney claimed again and again Wednesday night that his health plan would cover people with pre-existing conditions. Not really.

Insuring sick people is very expensive, which is why insurers typically reject them or charge them a fortune. The simplest fix is to require people to have health insurance, flooding insurers with healthy customers, so they can cover high-cost people without raising everyone's premiums sky high. That's how ObamaCare solved the problem, and that's how Romney solved it when he was governor of Massachusetts: Like ObamaCare, RomneyCare has an individual mandate.

But the mandate is GOP poison now, and Romney's plan doesn't have one. Instead, he would leave states to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Most states already have high-risk insurance pools, but they tend to be very hard to get into, charge high prices for coverage and often exclude coverage of the condition that made people eligible in the first place. That's not a plan; it's a con.

Another Romney claim is he's not calling for $5 trillion in tax cuts. Half false, half true. Romney's plan would extend the Bush tax cuts and cut rates an additional 20 percent, which along with other tax cuts would cost $5 trillion or more over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. Romney says other studies contradict this number, but the math is straightforward.

Where Romney has a point is in saying he'll offset all the lost revenue by trimming loopholes and deductions. But because the big ones are popular and widely used, he refuses to say which ones.

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Editorial: Presidential debate fantasy vs. reality TV

Thoughts on 52-year-old debate format; tricky history of first-debate wins; and factual distortions from both sides.